Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, / Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)
Evidence of the disaster that is overtaken American Muslim youth, while their super-good Muslim elders wrangle over the number of virtues or rewards they will get for this or that act, and while Muslim leadership has consistently slipped, over the past 30 years, into the hands of those who can’t write or speak or lead or whose primary qualifications centre on their race – White or Black for example – and place of birth, not to say outward appearance and clothes. For how many decades now has American Muslim leadership become a matter of personal power-grab, just like anyone else?
While American Muslim youth burns, and turns away from Islam in increasing numbers, American super-Muslim adults roll their Tasbeeh in a trance-like state and continue to hold their conventions and conferences. They can’t fiddle like Nero did when Rome burned because being good Muslims I suppose they feel fiddling is a non-Muslim thing. So, instead, they finger-roll the Subhah, if not in actual practice, at least mentally, and go about their ways.
Jum’ah Khutbahs (speeches) that used to be thoughtful, analytical, educational, challenging and absolutely gripping and inspirational throughout America and Canada during the 1970s gave way, starting with the early 1980s, to ramblings by an increasingly professionalized and salaried class of so-called imams and prayer-leaders who stood on the Mimbar and endlessly enumerated the virtues of this or that act of piety.
Gone were the days when Khutbahs (Jum’ah speeches) used to be delivered systematically and consistently by some of the best-educated and thoughtful young Muslims around who had discovered Islam through personal search. Those were the days when Muslims in America prayed in droves in the basement of churches. God bless the people who offered their premises to us in our hour of need.
Those were also the days when there weren’t too many worldly perks of wealth and power for Muslim congregants to fight over.
So, I did not cry upon seeing that text message by that renegade young Muslim. But as I said earlier, I cry every day over the condition of Muslims, young and old, on the one hand and on the state of Islam on the other hand. I cry over the condition to which Muslims have reduced Islam, this divine way that came from God to rescue humanity from its miserable existence on earth.
CRYING FOR HUMANITY
And I also cry at what we human beings – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – have done to God’s world and to his creation (Khalqullah): all that poverty; all that disease; all that hunger; and all that ignorance. And as if these things were not enough, there is all that fighting; all that cruelty; and all that blood and burning and barbarity everywhere.
And again as if these issues were not blood-curdling enough in and of themselves, there are all those lies, deceptions, half-truths and outright fabrications at the level of interpersonal interaction; at the level of business, finance and commerce; at the level of the mass media such as radio, newspaper and television; and at the level of the governments and their institutions.
Yes, my tearless eyes never stop crying for humanity and for my world. Innal insaana lafee khusr, I keep repeating to myself as the Qur’ān puts it. “What a terrible, terrible shape human life is in!”
EVERYONE WANTS PROOF
So, once again, everyone nowadays wants proof that Islam is really a divinely inspired system and not something Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, quickly made up in a cave.
Yes, that is what Muslims want too.
They want someone – preferably a White American convert, no matter what his qualifications and background and no matter what his views and beliefs – constantly telling them how great Islam is. Not seeing, believing and preaching that truth themselves, but someone, preferably a White voice sporting an American accent like I said before, telling and reassuring them that it is so.
It is that constant reassurance that Muslims want.
Iqbal had, a long time ago, pointed to this perversity in our thinking and way of life. He said: Yeh farangi ki taraqqi hai Musalman ki nahin! Paraphrase: If it is validation from the West that sustains our faith in ourselves and our way of life, then it is an achievement for the West, not for us.
It is also a bit of latter-day Muslim convergence perhaps with Rudyard Kipling’s Ganga Din character. Muslims had their Frontier Gandhi during the 1940s, so why not their own latter-day Ganga Din complex during the 1980s and 1990s?
You can’t quite call it the spirit of the nationalist-Islamic revolt of 1857 against Britain’s colonial occupation and enslavement of India and its people. But it certainly looks like a pervasive hankering for the comfort of continued tutelage and overlordship by White colonial masters, Sahibs and their progeny, even if it is in the name of Islam.
Bengal and Deccan gave Indian – now Indo-Pak-Bangla – Muslims their Mir Ja’fars and Mir Sadiqs. These were British stooges and Indian traitors with Muslim names and backgrounds who betrayed their own people and helped England conquer and subdue Muslim India. But Muslims of Indo-Pak India maybe did not have too many real and authentic Muslim Ganga Dins. Maybe now is the time to make up for all that lost opportunity. So, on any given day, a convert Sahib Muslim is better than a native generational Muslim, irrespective of the intrinsic merits or demerits of either.
BACK TO PROOF
Therefore, let us take up that theme one more time if you will: the theme of miracles in Islam and the theme of the proof of prophethood in Islam. Because what else is Islam if not one huge miracle – from beginning to end? And what is it if not one huge proof – or a constellation of a million proofs and miracles – in and of itself of its own divine origin and nature?
For, everything about Islam cries out that it could have come only from God and that Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, is really and truly what he says he is: God’s messenger to the world.
Thus Islam is a collection of a million miracles of all kinds in every aspect and detail of it. And so is the Qur’ān. And so are the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, that we collectively refer to as Hadith.
Some of them – these miracles – are known and understood by some people. But most, remain unknown, unrecognized and unappreciated by much of the world. But these miracles will continue to unfold as Allah’s world changes, evolves and moves toward the end he has decreed for it.
As someone once said, and as my mother, Allah bless her, always used to read: Aankh Waalaa Teyri Qudrat Kaa Tamaasha DeyKhey! Paraphrase: if only you had the eyes to behold the spectacle of God’s wonders.
May Allah, Rabbul Izzat, open our eyes and hearts to the wonders of his Deen. For, it is, as the Qur’ān says, the heart that truly beholds and comprehends these wonders, not the eyes, even though the miracles of Islam and the miracles of the life of Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, as well as the Qur’ān, are plain enough for anyone to see with naked eyes.